Yuki Takahashi
Welcome to my website. I am a postdoctoral researcher at
Tilburg University.
I am an applied microeconomist working on behavioral, gender, and labor economics topics, with a
particular interest in discrimination and its consequences.
My research primarily employs experimental methods, complemented by observational data.
I received my PhD in Economics from the
University of Bologna in July 2022.
I am non-binary (pronoun: they/them). You can find my CV here.
You can contact me at: y.takahashi@uvt.nl
Working papers
In a quasi-laboratory experiment, I show that individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who corrected them, even when the correction benefited the team. The likely mechanism is negative feedback aversion: more confident individuals are much less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes but not those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find suggestive evidence that men, but not women, are less willing to collaborate with women who corrected their mistakes, potentially due to (inaccurate) beliefs about women's abilities. This reluctance to collaborate with those who corrected them can undermine teamwork, especially in mixed-gender teams.
Light abuses and threats to receive them at home can deteriorate individuals' well-being, even in the absence of severe physical injury. Leveraging Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized minor domestic violence, I first confirm that the number of domestic violence incidents classified as criminal offenses against female partners indeed decreased sharply after the reform. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then show that the reform reduced married women's life satisfaction, increased depression, and increased college-educated married women's alcohol intake. Suggestive evidence indicates that the reform contributed to a decline in new marriages, while the divorce rate remained unchanged. These changes are unlikely to stem from shifts in violence outside the household, as there were no significant changes in gender-based violence or other crimes during the same period. These findings suggest that even minor intimate partner violence decreases married women's well-being and highlights the importance of legal institutions in addressing household violence.
Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.
Work in progress
Attention Discrimination in Performance Evaluation (with Jan Hausfeld and Boris van Leeuwen)
Are Men Driving Away Women from STEM Fields? (with Chihiro Inoue and Asumi Saito)
Curriculum Reform and Female Students' Major Choice (with Dede Long)
